Mary Oliver and Me
Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose body of work spans generations. She was writing and publishing poetry when my father was a young boy, and she continues to write and publish poetry today. Since I am familiar with her more contemporary body of work and feel there is something about her style I would love to weave into my own poetry, I decided to look back on her beginnings and see if these would affect me in the same way her contemporary poetry does. What I discovered is my complete admiration of Oliver’s simple word choices, her ability to convey sadness without being overtly or obnoxiously over-the-top, and her careful and beautiful use of sound. Because most of Oliver’s early books have gone out of print, I used poems from The Night Traveler and Sleeping in the Forest (1978) found in her New and Selected Poems anthology to come to my conclusions.
Oliver has a tendency to use simple words in her poetry, and yet these simple words convey a world of meaning. Never will her readers need a dictionary to define a word in her poem; she takes words found in everyday conversation and sculpts these simple building blocks into something bigger than itself. In “Ice,” for example, the only word her readers may not have seen before is “ice-grips,” and Olivier spends nearly five lines explaining, in simple terms, what they are: “(A device which slips over the instep/And holds under the shoe/A section of roughened metal, it allows you to walk/Without fear of falling/Anywhere on ice or snow.)”
Literary Ponderings and Such 